Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

This is my second post on what makes a good technology platform company, from the point of view of the companies that integrate into the platform. (I’m calling these companies “platformees.”) Here is a link to the first post, “So you want to be a platform? part one.” Again, this is focused on SaaS applications.

Good communication with partners on your platform. In my previous post on what makes a good platform I mention “consistent strategy.” The world is not perfect and companies do need to make changes sometimes! Solid and early communication with platform partners is the best way to prepare your platformees for change. Email seems to be the  best way to manage this, from my experience. It is also very helpful when the platform itself has good internal communication. When a startup (like mine) has a conversation with a member of the partner team at a platform we use that conversation as a basis for making important decisions (like committing time or effort to developmental or marketing plans.) If another person on the partner team at the platform then does something that destroys the effort we’ve spent it is very costly to us. Companies that want to be platforms need to realize that startups have very, very limited resources. We can’t afford to waste effort, because if we are not growing then we are dying. As an addendum to this, I would add that having a person or team that manages the relationships with your platformees is very helpful.

Reliability. When a big platform app goes down and the customer can’t use the little SaaS company’s integrated offering… well, the customer tends to blame the little guy. Telling a customer who is trying to access critical business data that “so-and-so big company is experiencing technical difficulties again and there is nothing I can do” really doesn’t help him/her have confidence in your app. Secondly, if new users can’t sign up then it means I’m not growing through your channel when you are down. Third, and I think a lot of SaaS companies tend to forget about this – we are still early in the adoption curve for SaaS. Most small business owners and many consumers are still not entirely comfortable with using/storing critical applications online. No one is going to be comfortable switching to online services if they are prone to outages.

I’ve got a few more points that I will try to make in the next post on platforms. Until then, happy integrations!